Doubletake: Intended for Evil, The Realm of the Dead

The World and Everything In It

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4.8 • 6.6K Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

After the communist Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia on April 17, 1975, they herded everybody out of the cities and into socialist “cooperatives.” Radha Manickam and family were sent to the country’s northwest, where they and 1.8 million others were dumped out of trains and told to start building villages.It was Year Zero, supposedly the start of the agrarian utopia promised by their Marxist masters.Instead, Radha watched the Khmer Rouge turn Cambodia into the realm of the dead.This series tells a hard and brutal story, but it’s also a story of hope and, ultimately, redemption. It’s based on my recent interviews with Radha, along with my 2016 book about his experiences. The book and this series are titled “Intended for Evil.”Support WORLD News Group at wng.org/donate (http://wng.org/donate)

Transcript

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0:00.0	From World Radio, this is Double Take. I'm Les Silers.
0:05.0	Last week, we introduced you to Radha Manicum. He was born and raised in Cambodia.
0:20.0	His family had immigrated there from India. On April 17,
0:23.6	1975, the Khmer Rouge defeated the U.S.-backed Khmer Republic after a five-year civil war.
0:29.6	And then by 9 o'clock, we hear there's rumble on the street, which is the Khmer Rouge drive in with the tank, the big
0:40.3	tang.
0:41.3	He was 22 years old. On that day, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh. They
0:47.3	forced at gunpoint every single resident of every single Cambodian city into the streets.
0:52.3	It's like a wave of ants crawling on the street.
0:57.3	And then into the countryside.
0:59.9	Thousands of people died.
1:01.9	Many were shot.
1:03.1	Others died on the street from the heat or infections.
1:07.1	Rada's family was first pushed into the countryside south of Phnom Penh.
1:12.3	After a few months,
1:18.1	they were among the 1.8 million people shipped to northwest Cambodia in the summer and fall of 1975, the region of Badambong. They were supposed to grow rice, lots and lots of rice.
1:26.9	When we left the Manicum's last episode, they and hundreds of others had just been
1:31.3	dumped off a train near a forested mountainside.
1:34.2	They were told to build huts there to make a new village, an Omtipidae.
1:39.2	It was one of thousands of new villages that Khmer Rouge set up in the first months of the regime.
1:45.0	Pol Pot's goal was to create a new society that was purely socialist and purely Khmer,
1:50.0	governed by a revolutionary organization called Anka.
	...

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